Saturday, April 11, 2020

The Number of Jews in Europe on the Eve of the Holocaust

Somebody requested in a Holocaust denial forum on my blog article Seriously Now, Where Did The Jews "Evacuated to The East" Go? that "the issue of these transported Jews" shall be "addressed correctly and precisely" by deniers. Brilliant idea! But also pretty naive - we are not calling that place "the cesspit" for nothing. Readily illustrated by the emoderator "Hannover" with his nervous attempt of damage control. High spam factor, little relevance and zero impact on the issue at the hand.

The deniers Graf, Mattogno and Kues? Already addressed in the same blog posting.

Jews in labour camps west of Treblinka and "Jews evacuated to USSR during war" prior Nazi occupation? Does not deal with the fate of unfit Jews "evacuated to the East" during Nazi occupation.

"1,250,000 – 1,500,000 Polish Jews homeless in Europe" (although carelessly attributed to Polish Jews in a letter by Stephen Wise, the figureactuallyrefers to all Jews outside the Soviet Union) and an "Influx of 3,000,000 JEWS" after the war? That's from the same bag of denier's trick and ignores that a figure of 3 - 4 million Jews in Europe after the war is the order of magnitude expected after the decimation of 5-6 million anyway. It does not help to explain away the Jewish losses during the war. But let's have a closer look at this one.

How many Jews had there been on the eve of the mass extermination of Jews in continental Europe (i.e., always without Great-Britain)? Let's start with how many Jews the Nazis estimated had been in Europe. This is complemented by estimations after the war as well a more recent monograph on Holocaust demographics.

First of all, we have the Korherr report - long version of 23 March 1943, short version of 19 April 1943 (BArch NS 19/1570, scans, text in German/English). The "long" Korherr provides figures of the Jewish population in Europe that sum up to 10.05 million (without Switzerland, Spain, Norway and Denmark). From this, one has to subtract double-counted 1.2 million Jews in Soviet occupied Poland. On the other hand, one needs to add 217,748 Jews who had been evacuated from the Reich and about 19,000 excess mortality in the Altreich and Ostmark to back-calculate to the 1941 figure. Including about 30,000 Jews from countries omitted by Korherr, there had been about 9.12 million Jews in Europe.

Secondly, there is the Wannsee protocol of 20 January 1942 by Adolf Eichmann. The figures on page six of the protocol sum up to about 10.9 million Jews. However, there is a mistake in the number for France. Instead of 700,000 for unoccupied France, it should read 170,000, which was provided by the Commissioner-General for Jewish Questions Xavier Vallat and reported in German News in December 1941 (see also Michman, Waren die Juden Nordafrikas im Visier der Planer der "Endlösung"?). The Wannsee protocol probably double-counted Galicia with 784,000 Jewish people (figure calculated from the next source). The figures for the baltic states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania correspond to the situation in January 1942 - not to that before German occupation. According to the 2nd Stahlecker report (PS-2273), about 205,000 Jews had been shot in the area. With these changes, the total number of Jews in continental Europe amounts to 9.78 millionJews.

Thirdly, we have an estimation of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden of 7 August 1941 provided to the RSHA (BArch R 58/7218, also BArch R 8150/25), which yields a sum of 9.3 million Jews in Europe. Note that some of the data in the compilations of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden was also reproduced or used as basis for calculations in the Wannsee protocol and the Korrherr report (Kempe & Klein, Die Wannsee-Konferenz am 20. Januar 1942; Christian Eckl, Richard Korherrs "Bericht über die Endlösung der europäischen Judenfrage").

As early as June 1945, the Institute of Jewish Affairs compiled an estimation of the number of Jews in pre-war Europe. Adding those countries that have not been included, one ends up with about 9.1 million people. In 1946, the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry determined that there had been about 9.6 million Jewsin Europe before the war.

In 1991, Benz et al. published with "Dimension des Völkermords" a multi-author study on the number of Jewish victims. The 1941 figures add up to 9.23 million Jews in Europe. Adding another about 40,000 in countries not considered in the study, it can be concluded that there had been almost 9.3 million Jews in continental Europe before the Holocaust (see Table 1).

How was the situation after the war?

At first, a look again on what contemporaries had determined early on: Philip Bernstein, adviser on Jewish Affairs to Commander of US Forces in Europe, estimated the number of the Jews in post-war Europe on 20 June 1947 in the United States House of Representatives' Committee on the Judiciary. He stated that "apart from the 2 1/4 million Jews in the Soviet Union who are pretty much cut off from the general Jewish population, there are about a million and a quarter Jews surviving in Europe", therefore estimating that in total 3.5 million Jews were left in Europe. The Institute of Jewish Affair obtained a figure of 3.4 million Jewish people in Europe after the war (incl. those countries missing in the data). The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry published a figure of about 3.88 million Jews left in continental Europe.

The multi-author study by Benz et al. results in 3.66 millionJews in post-war Europe (3.72 million with those countries not considered in the study) (see Table 2).

Now it's easy to do the math: with about 9.27 million and 3.72 million Jews before the Holocaust and after the war respectively in continental Europe and Russia, the Jewish losses amount to about 5.55 million people.

This figure describes all Jewish losses captured by the available demographic data, including war losses and excess natural mortality. For the Soviet Union, it is estimated that as much as 280,000 Jewish deaths resulted from the war and excess mortality (Mark Kupovetsky in: Kokh, Denial of Denial, 2012 p. 166). Thus, the death toll from anti-Jewish policy amounts to about 5.3 million people according to this approach.

In his classic work The Destruction of the Europea Jews (1961), Raul Hilberg published the result of 5.1 million Jewish victims. Dieter Pohl arrived at a Jewish death toll in the range of 5.3 to 5.9 million (in: Kokh, Denial of Denial, 2012 p. 143, Pohl's article was originally published in German in 2005). HC blog's Nick Terry computed a figure of 5.36 million here but informs that he would nowadays further refine this result with more recent literature (see Table 3).

How significant are these Jewish losses in front of the fact that a bloody war was going on in Europe? Let's put these figures into perspective.

About 2 million Soviet Jews did not come under German occupation (Benz, Dimension des Völkermords, p. 509). Thus, more than 70% of the Jews in the range of the Nazis or its Allies died between 1941 to 1945. For comparison, about 6% of the ethnic Poles died during German occupation (Political Migrations on Polish Territories (1939–1950), p. 179).

This huge difference in the mortality of one order of magnitude corresponds to the effect of the extreme hatred towards a minority, destroying their livelihood and the systematic mass killing of the Jewish people in Europe.

[W1]: Wannsee protocol; figures for 1941. [W2]: 165,000 (occupied) + 170,000 (unoccupied, not 700,000)[W3]: 2,994,684 - 784,000 (Galicia); note that the figure for Bessarabia & Bukovina has been likely exaggerated by 200k, see [R2] [W4]: according to 2nd Stahlecker report (replacing zero as of January 1942) [W5]: according to 2nd Stahlecker report (replacing 3,500 as of January 1942) [W6]: according to 2nd Stahlecker report (replacing 34,000 as of January 1942)

[1]: demographic balance for eastern and central European countries and Soviet Union from Table 1 (last two columns), difference to Benz's own death toll indicated in references. Without subtracting Soviet war losses and excess mortality in the hinterland (280,000).[2]: according to Central Jewish Consistory (instead of 11,393)[3]: according to 1941 census and data on survivors (instead of 211,214) [4]: according to 1941 census and data on survivors (instead of 550,000)[5]: according to 1940 census and data on survivors (instead of 65,703)[6]: according to 1939 census and data on survivors (instead of 65,459)[7]: according to May 1941 report of Reichsvereinigung der Juden and data on survivors (instead of 165,000)[8]: according to 1931 census, extrapolated to 1939, and 300,000 survivors (instead of 2,700,000 - 3,000,000)[9]: according to 1939 and 1959 census, extrapolated to 1945 (instead of 2,100,000)

[P1]: in: Kokh, Denial of Denial (2012), p. 143; death toll broken down to local administrative areas for eastern European countries and Soviet Union, updating figures in Benz.

30 comments:

How is Babi Yar a "well-documented atrocity?" There's literally not a shred of evidence to support it. It's never been investigated in any way. No one has ever found human remains or bullet casings in the ravine. It was just a story put out by the Soviet NKVD, and why would anyone trust them?

- it's never been investigated in every way -It has, immediately after WW2.

- no one has ever found human remains or bullet casings in the ravine -Both have been found, plenty of times. Even decades after the war, physical remains were found.

- it was just a story put out by the Soviet NKVD -The Soviet NKVD and other Soviet organizations literally ignored the well documented reality of Babi Yar, because the Nazis massacring only the Jews contradicted their narrative of "the Great Patriotic war".

Official reports from the Soviets avoided mentioning that the massacre happened, and glossed over the fact that the Nazis singled out the Jews for killing. They even banned Jewish commemoration attempts and forced them to blame "the Zionists" for the massacre. But sure, genius. The "Soviet NKVD" put it out.

The massacre as such was not hidden, but its Jewish nature was almost completely erased for the outside world (whereas the internal, then-unpublished interrogations, including of the Jews forced to burn the bodies, make it clear). So it is indeed completely implausible that a specifically Jewish massacre would be fabricated only then for its Jewish aspect to be hidden.

When the Germans captured Vinnitsa, they undertook a forensic investigation of the massacre of some 10,000 Ukrainians by the NKVD during the Red Terror. Journalists and investigators from all over the world went to Vinnitsa to witness the proceedings. The bodies were examined, identified, and reburied. Most importantly, there were bodies.

There has never been any such investigation for the Babi Yar massacre. If you claim there was, show me this investigation and its findings. Again, 30,000 supposed victims. Shouldn't be too hard to show evidence.

"The Soviet NKVD and other Soviet organizations literally ignored the well documented reality of Babi Yar, because the Nazis massacring only the Jews contradicted their narrative of "the Great Patriotic war"."The NKVD created the story. This isn't debatable. They interviewed the several Jewish "witnesses" and they were the ones who spread the story to Western journalists after the Soviets captured Kiev in 1943. It was a major propaganda push by the Soviet government.

Can you read? The Babi Yar story was concocted by Ilya Ehrenburg and the NKVD. The Extraordinary State Commission later "investigated" the claims the same way they "investigated" the Katyn Massacre, a mass execution of Poles conducted by the NKVD which the ESC blamed on the Germans. Nobody should consider them to be a reputable source.

You are lying of course since the massacre was thoroughly documented by the Germans themselves, obviously, Ehrenburg had nothing to do with it. Vinnitsa etc. have zero to do with this as bodies were not burned by the NKVD.

I read your link. There is no physical evidence offered. You have some dubious documents and some quotes of hearsay, that's it.

It shouldn't be hard to prove killings of 30,000-300,000 people. That's the roughly population of a large town. Where are the bodies? What were the names of the victims? Where are the Ukrainian eyewitnesses? It happened in their city.

The whole Babi Yar narrative is preposterous. I'm supposed to believe that the Germans simply asked tens of thousands of Jews to show up at this place to get shot, and then 3 years later, the Germans went back to that spot, dug up all the bodies, ground them into dust using "bone crunching machines," and destroyed all the evidence... while being pursued by the Red Army?

Sorry, but that's a joke of a narrative and no sensible person would ever believe it.

Actually, the documents are iron clad. They all talk explicitly about the Nazis massacring Jews, and we know for a fact that Soviet Policy was to minimize the Killings of Jews. They would never "fabricate" evidence that contradicted their narrative.

"The whole Babi Yar narrative is preposterous. I'm supposed to believe that the Germans simply asked tens of thousands of Jews to show up at this place to get shot, and then 3 years later, the Germans went back to that spot, dug up all the bodies, ground them into dust using "bone crunching machines," and destroyed all the evidence... while being pursued by the Red Army?"

If you widened to Ukraine as a whole you might stand a chance of comprehending events better.

200,000 Jews in Kiev before the war; about 40,000 remained; city occupied and crawling with Germans, who order the Jews to appear for 'resettlement' (which might mean rehousing or expulsion for all they knew - the city had been encircled and news of atrocities elsewhere wasn't widespread at the time). The remaining Jews would skew elderly or young due to evacuations and call-ups. About 34,000 report in, many thousands evade the order and escape or were caught later. Their shooting was the talk of the town and extremely well documented.

*Two* years later, the Nazis try covering up their atrocities in Ukraine, but have already given up Kharkov, leaving a mass grave at the Drobitskii Yar ravine with over 10,000 corpses, whose names are known from the registration of the Jews in the Kharkov ghetto. The Nazis manage part of the cover-up job at Kiev, but fail in most other Ukrainian cities, leaving mass graves in Rovno, Zhitomir, Dnepropetrovsk, Kamenets Podoolsk, etc, of documented Nazi mass killings, because they were indeed "being pursued by the Red Army".

With the pattern of documented killings leaving intact mass graves to be found, in which the non-evacuated, non-escaping, non-conscripted Jews were buried after being murdered, for someone to believe that Kiev would be an exception to these patterns requires either an extreme inability to think comparatively or some sort of evidence that might support the idea that Kiev was an exception.

Just to add to Dr. Terry's point, in the Nuremberg Trials that the denier whines about so much, the Soviets avoided talking about those killing sites Dr. Terry listed. When they did mention them, they glossed over the fact that the victims were Jewish and killed for being Jewish. This extended Post war, when the killing sites were neglected and all commemoration banned.

Why would Jews, who were hiding among the general populace of a wartorn city, comply with the demands of an occupying power? That doesn't make any sense. Look at New York City today, they don't even comply with orders to social distance, but I'm supposed to believe they complied with an order to show up for certain death? Give me a break.

"Their shooting was the talk of the town and extremely well documented."Really? It was the talk of the town? Then why has there never been a single Ukrainian witness to this supposed shooting, which took place in their capital city? Why does the entire narrative hinge on a silly story concocted by the NKVD, the very organization which was notorious for terrorism and genocide and committed actual mass shootings like Katyn and Vinnitsa? Shootings, BTW, which they famously tried to pin on Germans.

"leaving mass graves in Rovno, Zhitomir, Dnepropetrovsk, Kamenets Podoolsk, etc"I'm just going to assume that no bodies or human remains have been found here, either. I'm not interested in claims and hearsay, and I'm certainly not interested in nonsense from the Soviet government, a government which was guilty of actual genocide.

"Why would Jews, who were hiding among the general populace of a wartorn city, comply with the demands of an occupying power? That doesn't make any sense. Look at New York City today, they don't even comply with orders to social distance, but I'm supposed to believe they complied with an order to show up for certain death? Give me a break."

Look at the placards which are in the link to the docs above. I misremembered that resettlement was mentioned - all Jews were ordered to report to a spot OR THEY WOULD BE SHOT. Anyone found helping or hiding a Jew WOULD ALSO BE SHOT.

So the remaining Jews of Kiev, who would be biased towards those less able to flee (children, elderly) and those who had not fled the city out of fear and probably were less suspicious of the Germans, had a choice: either they hid or they complied. Either they were more likely to be shot later or the order to report might not be for anything bad.

The compliance was not total, many thousands who were trapped in the city did not do so. The overall "compliance" was 17% since 34K out of 200K Kievan Jews compiled. 10s of 1000s of Kievan Jews fled the city or allowed themselves to be evacuated - bear in mind that unless one was a skilled worker for an evacuated factory, there would be less excuse for simply upping and leaving a war zone. Many of the able-bodied male Kievan Jews were surely mobilised and fell into Nazi captivity elsewhere, either as soldiers or labour conscripts (trench diggers).Yes, this context matters for understanding why up to 90% of the Jews remaining in the city compiled with the report-here-or-be-shot order.

Since the Soviet press did not publicise the Nazi persecution of the Jews in Poland in 1939-41 due to the Nazi-Soviet pact, and since publicity regarding killings earlier in the summer was only just appearing, while Kiev was close to the battle zone for weeks before capture, then that 17% who reported certainly included many who were utterly ignorant of Nazi intentions. There are reports across the occupied USSR of elderly Jews remembering the benign 1918 occupation and thinking things would be OK. That could have been just a thousand of the 34K who reported in, with 3K thinking it was only a resettlement and 30K reporting out of fear of being shot if they evaded and were caught, hoping that the stories they'd heard were untrue. We don't know the exact proportion, but your incredulity regarding human behaviour and ignorance of the context just aren't arguments.

"Really? It was the talk of the town? Then why has there never been a single Ukrainian witness to this supposed shooting, which took place in their capital city?"

See the documents compilation, #34 and 35, diaries of L. Nartova and I. Khoroshunova, for contemporary reactions of non-Jewish Kievans. Just for starters.

"Why does the entire narrative hinge on a silly story concocted by the NKVD, the very organization which was notorious for terrorism and genocide and committed actual mass shootings like Katyn and Vinnitsa? Shootings, BTW, which they famously tried to pin on Germans."

See the document compilation - news of the massacre in Kiev spread at the time via German soldiers and officials to other Germans behind the frontlines, and to Switzerland. Not included in the compilation are other diaries recording contemporary reactions to news of the massacre in Kiev, in Breslau (Willy Cohn) and Dresden (Viktor Klemperer). Also not included are remarks in the report of Dr Hans Koch about a visit of foreign journalists to Kiev shortly afterwards, who asked embarrassing questions about what they'd heard about the massacre and had to be fobbed off.

The contemporary non-official evidence for Babi Yar shows this cannot have been an NKVD invention; the existence of 18 official documents from the placard to confirmations of police battalions, most captured by the Western allies, would be self-authenticating to all but an implacable denier, but the non-Soviet contemporary sources provide further confirmation that reducing Babi Yar to a Soviet invention is utter bullshit.

Note that the Nartova and Khoroshunova private diaries aren't NKVD inventions, either. Khoroshunova's diary covers every aspect of the Nazi occupation, from the mass starvation of Soviet POWs in the nearby Darnitsa POW camp, to the impressment of Ostarbeiter and hunger in Kiev, to Nazi terror and their colonial-style occupation policies and pomposity. She also was friends with people who hid Jews in the city.

"I'm just going to assume that no bodies or human remains have been found here, either. I'm not interested in claims and hearsay, and I'm certainly not interested in nonsense from the Soviet government, a government which was guilty of actual genocide."

On the contrary, the mass graves were located and opened, there are photographs of a variety of the sites in the Soviet Extraordinary Commission records.

Since these mass executions are mostly recorded in German documents many of which were not captured by the Soviets, and not filed away by NKVD fairies for unsuspecting Western investigators or future historians to find, your dismissal of any Soviet source fails.

If you want to dismiss Soviet sources out of hand, feel free, just know that nothing you say about the history of the Soviet Union, including the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and the Nazi occupation's violence against non-Jews, needs to be taken seriously.

If you want to persist in claiming that the NKVD invented everything about the extermination of the Jews in Ukraine, then provide some evidence of this - not pointing to Katyn, which is the exception to the rule (Stalinist mass grave sites are known and none of the others were palmed off on the Nazis), not with some generic conspiratorial waffle or suspicions or paranoia, not with pointing to exaggerations (the word does not mean invent) that can be corrected when on looks at other sources -

provide some actual external independent evidence of an NKVD conspiracy to hoax all this. Don't forget to explain the massive demographic slump of Ukrainian/Soviet Jews and the 1959 census - with evidence.

Sergey is running out of patience, so make your few remaining posts count.

1. If the Germans were placing placards throughout Kiev instead of directly rounding its Jewish population up, it meant that the Germans had no ability to differentiate Jews from Ukrainians. Knowing that, it makes no sense for Jews to comply with those orders, as they could simply not show up, or try to find a way to leave the city. It's a risk but surely more sensible than just following the orders of a rival army. Are there any other examples of Germans doing this kind of thing anywhere else?

2. The Nartova diary entry doesn't mention any killings, just refugee movement. Not an eyewitness to the massacre.

3. The Chorosunova dairy entry merely states that other people are saying that people were shot. Hearsay. Also not an eyewitness.

4. The Swiss statement is more "I heard this happened" hearsay. The statements from German defectors (traitors) are yet more hearsay.

5. The Soviet government is not a reputable source of information. "The Soviet Yiddish Language Press?" lol. No, sorry.

6. I did not claim the NKVD invented every story of killings of Jews in Ukraine, I said they concocted the Babi Yar story, which they did through the interrogations of a few Jewish "witnesses" and the compiling of rumors made during the war. This forms the basis of the narrative.

I do not have to explain atrocity propaganda. On the contrary, you have to explain why there's no physical evidence of any massacre at Babi Yar, just a bunch of stories printed in communist and Jewish newspapers. 33,000 bodies, even ones supposedly destroyed by giant furnaces (lol) would leave a mountain of human remains, not to mention countless eyewitnesses to both the shootings themselves and the subsequent destruction of the remains, which according to the narrative, took over a month. Yet there's none. No remains found, no victims identified. Nothing. Ludicrous.

Until someone does a forensic investigation into this supposed massacre, I consider it an obvious example of atrocity propaganda.

Of course the Germans had the ability to differentiate in most cases, the lack of ability obviously does not follow from the placards, most of the Jews, knowing they would be shot otherwise, had no choice but follow the order, which was formally for a resettlement.The diary contents are exactly what you would expect the locals to experience, but you've also been pointed to the Ukrainian eyewitnesses, not merely diaries. Plenty of ashes found after the war.The massacre is extremely well documented and hence an objective fact, this cannot be an atrocity propaganda by def.Ignore this once more and you're out.

How would such an order be enforced? What were the Germans going to do, visit every apartment in the city asking who the Jews were? That's ridiculous.

If Babi Yar has never been excavated, and no physical remains of 30,000 victims have ever been uncovered, and there are no eyewitnesses to the supposed massacre, and no aerial photographs showing the massacre or the six week-long destruction of the remains, and the only things we know of the supposed massacre are tall tales from the Soviet government, then there is no reason to believe the Babi Yar massacre isn't just another example of the Soviets fabricating a German atrocity which never happened.

I consider this matter settled even if you continue to cling to Soviet propaganda.

"1. If the Germans were placing placards throughout Kiev instead of directly rounding its Jewish population up, it meant that the Germans had no ability to differentiate Jews from Ukrainians. Knowing that, it makes no sense for Jews to comply with those orders, as they could simply not show up, or try to find a way to leave the city. It's a risk but surely more sensible than just following the orders of a rival army. Are there any other examples of Germans doing this kind of thing anywhere else?"

Oh for God's sake, the Germans registered Jews *everywhere* in occupied Eastern Europe. In your fantasy-land, they could have avoided that and gone about their lives... except: 1) Soviet passports indicated nationality and thus who was Jewish, losing papers was suspect and would attract further scrutiny. The time-frame under discussion here is too short for false papers to be an option2) if deemed suspect and arrested, male Jews would be revealed by so-called 'trouser inspections' (which also cost many Soviet Muslims and other groups their lives when their circumcision was mistaken for proof of Jewishness).

You totally ignored the point that whoever was left in Kiev would by necessity be less fearful, less well informed or less believing of stories of Nazi killings than the ones who'd fled the city.

The notice to assemble was accompanied by rumours that this was a resettlement, as the German documents note. Having put out a deceptive cover story, the remaining Jews were told, you should assemble for resettlement, implying they would go somewhere, a city district perhaps, or out of the city.

The Germans ordered the movement of far more Jews across Warsaw on pain of arrest and punishment in 1940. Sure, some went underground at the time, but going underground and living illegally was difficult, and so it wasn't until 1942 that this happened on a large scale in Warsaw (or elsewhere in central/western Poland).

In Lviv, during late 1941, a ghetto was ordered created with over 100,000 inhabitants. There had been massacres in Lviv as well as pogroms, earlier in the summer. But the population compiled (with some exceptions who went underground), because the alternative of trying to survive illegally seemed worse at the time.

The Jews of Kiev were deceived! They weren't being sent to a ghetto as in Warsaw or Lviv, they weren't being resettled out of the city as happened in Bialystok around this time to many thousands of Jews, they were force marched under armed guard to an execution site.

They didn't know, couldn't know for sure, what exactly would happen to them. At this time, large-scale massacres had indeed taken place in western Ukraine, but entire city communities had not yet been wiped out. The Jews in Kiev couldn't know very much about those massacres as they were behind Soviet lines when they happened. Once the Germans controlled all of Ukraine, then Ukrainians and others were able to move from city to city, and brought news of the massacres with them. But this hadn't happened in the last week of September 1941. The Jews of Kiev who remained in the city were in the dark.

As for the level of German control, there were likely 10s of 1000s of Wehrmacht forces in Kiev at this time, including security units. The HSSPF South sent two battalions of Order Police to help screen off the shooting site ('Absperrdienst'), and those 1000 policemen would have gone a long way, together with military police and guard units, in rousting out Jews who stayed at home.

The Germans also brought with them Ukrainian nationalist collaborator auxiliaries, who were soon organised into a police force, and recruited locally.

All that would have looked pretty overwhelming to frightened civilians, especially if they were elderly or mothers with children.

"2. The Nartova diary entry doesn't mention any killings, just refugee movement. Not an eyewitness to the massacre.

3. The Chorosunova dairy entry merely states that other people are saying that people were shot. Hearsay. Also not an eyewitness.

4. The Swiss statement is more "I heard this happened" hearsay. The statements from German defectors (traitors) are yet more hearsay."

Simply crying 'hearsay!' isn't enough; this isn't a court of law, this is history.

HOW did those sources come to hear about the massacre of tens of thousands of Jews in Kiev? That is the historical question which requires answering, and you've signally failed to do so.

You can of course hypothesise that some nasty NKVD man went around Kiev in late September 1941 spreading rumours, but this wouldn't really explain why German soldiers heard about it, why diarists in Germany heard about it, and doesn't explain why diarists in Kiev reported on the assembly (Nartova) and noted that everyone was talking about the massacre after it happened (Khoroshunova).

"5. The Soviet government is not a reputable source of information. "The Soviet Yiddish Language Press?" lol. No, sorry.

6. I did not claim the NKVD invented every story of killings of Jews in Ukraine, I said they concocted the Babi Yar story, which they did through the interrogations of a few Jewish "witnesses" and the compiling of rumors made during the war. This forms the basis of the narrative."

But your claim that the NKVD concocted the story of Babi Yar is refuted by the official Nazi documents, which you've not been able to explain away and are ignoring, and by the fact that sources which are NOT inclined to be influenced by hypothetical NKVD whisper propaganda - or however you think the story arose - talked about the massacre *IN 1941*. In a matter of days, weeks, months of the massacre happening.

The 18 official Nazi (and collaborator) sources reporting on the massacre and documenting its mechanics fuck you over entirely. They're enough to prove the event, as has already been pointed out - and they mean your dismissal of Soviet sources including their 1943 investigation of the site fails at the first hurdle.

You can of course repeat the denialist exercise with nearly all the massacre in the 20th and 21st Century, barring a handful of exceptions. Nanjing, Amritsar, Setif, the Brno death march, the Volhynian massacres of 1943 of Poles by Ukrainians, the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, the Armenian massacres and death marches of 1915, the Rwandan genocide... none were 'forensically investigated' then or later, none of the death tolls were calculated by counting corpses. Which is not to say that evidence is lacking for them including photos and physical evidence, just as we have for the Holocaust - rather that your apparent expectations are totally unrealistic.

So basically you can't do history and should stick to something less challenging, like origami, or basket-weaving, or whatever it is they have long term residents of mental health facilities do these days.

To add to what Nick wrote, here is what Anatoly Kuznetsov (a Russian-Ukrainian, non-Jewish, anti-Soviet author who himself was a witness to the events and an earwitness to the massacre) wrote in his Babi Yar book:

"We can confidently assume that most people felt the same way as Dina, felt something was not right, but kept clinging to "we're being moved out" for additional reasons.When the order came out, nine out of ten Jews had not heard about any fascist atrocities against Jews. Before the war, Soviet newspapers only praised Hitler, the best friend of the Soviet Union, and reported nothing about the situation of Jews in Germany and Poland. Even enthusiastic admirers of Hitler as a talented statesman could be found among Kiev Jews.On the other hand, the old men told how the Germans were in Ukraine in 1918, and then they did not touch the Jews, on the contrary, they treated them quite well, because - a similar language and all that ...The old people were talking:- There are different Germans, but in general they are a cultured and decent people, this is not wild Russia, this is Europe - and European decency.Or take this very fresh fact. Two days ago, some people on Vorovskogo Street seized the apartment of an evacuated Jewish family. The relatives who remained in the house went to the headquarters of the nearest German unit and complained. Immediately an officer appeared, strictly ordered to release the apartment and kindly bowed to the Jews: "Please, everything is all right". It was literally the day before yesterday, and everyone saw it, and rumors immediately spread. And Germans are very consistent and logical, if anything, they have always exceled in consistency."

Since you've read the link, you know that the massacre is extremely well-documented and is thus an objective fact, which is hence proven, so it is indeed not hard to prove those killings. The bodies were burned, the eyewitnesses are cited in the second part on the Babi Yar series.